Picart's previous books include Eroticism, Death, Music, and
Laughter in Thomas Mann and Friedrich Nietzsche, and The
Rebirths of Frankenstein. The current title is a spirited,
highly critical work devoted to "interpreting [Nietzsche's]
peculiar misogyny via symptomatological criteria that he himself
establishes" (2-3). Picart regards Nietzsche's "gendered mythology"
as a key to the symptomatology of his "politics linked with
aesthetics" (6). The author explains that Nietzsche's actual
relationships with women are not of central concern to her, since
her macroscopic focus, in concert with her genealogical approach,
aims "to lay bare how Nietzsche's own gradually congealing
politico-aesthetics eventfully harden into a misogyny seething with
ressentiment against his own inability to birth the
Übermensch" (16). For those who might wonder about
Nietzsche's alleged ressentiment (he was, after all, the
author of this particular theory of modernist criticism), Picart
makes it clear that there are no sacred cows in her approach; not
only is Nietzsche himself "irremediably diseased and decadent," but
the fundamental dichotomy of his political philosophy, namely, the
opposition between health and disease, is itself "rotten to the
core" (19). Relying on Ricoeur and Irigaray, Picart sets out to
show that although Nietzsche initially elevated the feminine as a
valid symbol for vitality, he eventually attempts to "harness the
feminine power of birthing unto an increasingly phallocentric
mythology" (21). Thus Picart uses the notion of resentment much
differently than Claudia Crawford, for whom "resentment criticism"
is a male, un-Dionysian enterprise of which Nietzsche did not
partake, and Picart also differs strikingly from the view of
Lampert (and myself) that Nietzsche becomes more sympathetic
toward and inclusive of the feminine as he matures—suffice it to
say, the author has our attention early on.

Picart elaborates her thesis in five exquisitely titled
chapters: "Genealogies of the 'Feminine' and 'Woman'"; "The
Pre-Zarathustran Phase: Exca/Elevating the Mother"; "The
Zarathustran Phase: The Phallic Mother"; "The Post-Zarathustran
Phase: Emasculate Conception"; and "Looking Back, Looking Forward."
Her approach is attentive to the swings and migrations of
Nietzsche's thought, for example, where she describes the
post-Zarathustran phase as moving "from resuscitating modernity to
encouraging its suicide" (30). The pre-Zarathustran Nietzsche,
still Faustian, hangs his "gendered politics" on the thread of Art;
he abandons older dichotomies such as Apollo-Dionysus,
Socrates-Euripides, but he introduces a "realignment of mythic
figures" that continues to revolve around these polarities: to the
free spirit belong Janus, Aphrodite, Achilles, the centaur, while
to the fettered spirit belong Pandora and Homer (48). Though
Nietzsche's attitude toward the feminine is undeniably complex in
this phase, Picart claims that Nietzsche devoted his efforts to
masculinizing woman and regarded this as a feasible political
project, analogous to his boast that he had successfully treated
himself in overcoming "that crippling and emasculating disease,
Romanticism." The problem is, according to Picart, Nietzsche
remained a masked Romantic, and his vehement attempts to free
himself are nothing but attestations to his decadence, his
inescapable Romanticism (78-79). On the question of whether
Nietzsche remained a Romantic, the decisive issue appears to be
that he resented his status as a Romantic and therefore
adopted a mask; for in intellectual historical terms, if Nietzsche
indeed never succeeded in overcoming Romanticism, would he not be
particularly sympathetic toward and inclusive of the feminine, as
is historically the case with Romantics?

For the Zarathustra phase, Picart relies strongly, and I think
wisely, on the writings of Karl Kerenyi, in order to explore the
complexity of both Dionysus and Zarathustra. Nietzsche was clearly
capable of mediating and interpreting the Greek myths, and in this
phase he weaves into "a new tapestry a conglomerate of myths
combining the figures of Dionysus, Zeus, and Apollo." More
specifically his "appropriation of the mythic rebirths of Dionysus
enables him to construct a political mythology of male birth, thus
allowing him to cast himself in the figures of mutilated father and
son who...

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